Allison & Lillia – 16

Episode at a Glance:
After running into an excited Carlo at the port, Lillia and Treize board the charity seaplane with a large group of children. Meanwhile, a surveillance team informs Travas of the situation, so he declares a state of emergency to his colleagues and contacts Allison, asking her to take off right away. Back on the seaplane, Treize notices that the flight is taking much longer than expected, and after checking the position of the sun, realizes they’re headed in the opposite direction of Rachika. Because of this, Lillia and him decide to check the cockpit out, only to find the pilots and engineer abandoning the plane by parachuting out. Treize tries to prevent the last one of them from getting away, but is unable to do to, so both him and Lillia continue to the cockpit.

There, Treize manages to stabilize the plane’s flight, but neither him nor Lillia have experience flying a seaplane. With the radio destroyed, Lillia recalls Mateo telling them about an automated emergency distress signal device, but they’re uncertain if such an old plane is equipped with one. Remembering that the engineer dropped a wireless radio before escaping, Treize asks Lillia to go grab it and to call Carlo here as well. When Carlo arrives, Treize fills the youngster in on the situation, and with the help of Allison’s persuasion, is able to convince him to keep the other children calm in the meantime. Treize then tries to turn the plane about, but gets fired upon by a squadron of planes resembling the one from last time. Forced to stay on course, Treize realizes that they’ve been following them since they took off.

The unidentified squadron then radios them, and pretend that Lillia and Treize are in the suspicious plane, making it evident that they’re working together with the flight crew that escaped earlier. Lillia and Treize are told to abandon the plane if they want to save their own lives, but Lillia refuses to do so and threatens to run into them if they get fired on. Hearing her say this, Treize comes up with an idea and decides to crash into their planes, in hopes of activating their automated emergency distress signal. However, he realizes there’s probably a zero percent chance that everyone will go unharmed in the process.

Next Episode:
「大義の翼」 (Taigi no Tsubasa)
“Wings of a Great Cause”

Impressions:
“The Plane Named Conspiracy” would’ve been a fitting title for this episode as well, seeing as Lillia and Treize got dragged into something similar to Allison and Wil before. As for the soldiers seen last time, I didn’t expect them to be working under “Major” Travas, but from a viewer’s perspective, I’m kind of relieved that the focus of the story is on the charity seaplane now, rather than juggling between what’s happening on the ground and in the air. Given how this series likes to throw us into a roller coaster of a ride all the time, I think one conspiracy at a time is enough for me to wrap my head around.

On another note, I’m quite pleased to see that Allison and Travas still have roles in the second arc of this series, as they haven’t had much screen time lately. Granted, this is the Lillia and Trieze arc and we probably shouldn’t expect to see much of Allison and Wil, but I kind of miss them already. (Benedict and Fiona, not so much for some reason.) It looks like Lillia’s parents are going to come through this time though, and seeing them about to already feels a bit nostalgic, despite their arc only ending three episodes ago. While Treize is probably going to pull through in his own dependable way, I’m eager to see Allison swoop in and shoot down the airplanes that are forcibly escorting the seaplane full of children somewhere. As for those suspicious men‘s reasons for doing so, it seems like Treize has already caught on, but is going to keep quiet like Wil always did. Speaking of which, they never seem to leave quite enough clues for us to figure things out for ourselves, so I can’t even begin to speculate what those reasons are. (e.g. I suspected that Major Stork might have been an acquaintance of Allison’s father, but never the actual person.)

While for now Allison and Wil’s role is pretty minor I think as the 2nd story moves along and the kids get mixed up into a bigger mess that the parents will play a bigger part. Just like how Allisons father did in the final arc for the first part.

I still feel that it’s going to be another setup so that Lilia in the end finds out her father is still alive and right next to her (just with a different name and hair color).

Most of the clues that allow the readers to piece things together themselves kind of get left in the books. (Wil’s deductions at the end of the first three books are more along the lines of “Well, whaddaya know…” rather than “How the HELL did you come up with THAT?”) This is only slightly less annoying than the random plot changes (like to the infiltration of the base in episode 3, or the balcony hostage situation in episode 8).